Malcolm Smith's blog has an interesting story about an auditory premonition of a shipwreck in 1899, which was published in the 1950s. The Reverend Charles H. Kelly, then President of the Methodist conference, was intending to sail to Jersey, but:
"The night before he should have left London he heard a voice three times in the night say: "Don't go to Jersey!" He was perplexed as it was quite an audible voice that he heard, but it was his first experience of the supernatural. He decided at first to pay no heed to the warning, but his sister from Torquay sent him a telegram following a dream she had. When he arrived at Waterloo Station he felt so troubled that he decided not to travel after all."
The ship, the SS Stella, hit the Casquets near Alderney, and sank with heavy loss of life. Kelly's life had been spared thanks to the warning voice
The details given about the wreck of the Stella appear to be accurate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Stella_(1890)
and Kelly was certainly a real person
https://www.mywesleyanmethodists.org.uk/...es-h-kelly
but it turns out that in 1910 he had published his own account of the incident, in a book entitled "Memories", and this tells quite a different story:
https://archive.org/details/memories00kell/page/324
In this version, instead of hearing a warning voice three times in the night, Kelly wrote that "during the day [I] had a strong presentiment of danger, and felt as if voices of the unseen warned me not to go."
Perhaps more significantly, the details of the ship don't match those of the SS Stella, and in fact there's no mention that any lives were lost from the ship Kelly would have sailed on. It had to return to Southampton, having collided with a French ship whose crew was lost, near the Needles, off the Isle of Wight.
Kelly's version is a lot less dramatic than the one published in the 1950s. But perhaps even the earlier version should be treated with caution. He wrote that it had happened "many years ago". Unfortunately Wikipedia's handy "List of shipwrecks of England" doesn't seem to include one that matches the details given in Kelly's account. Unless I'm missing something:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sh...e_of_Wight
"The night before he should have left London he heard a voice three times in the night say: "Don't go to Jersey!" He was perplexed as it was quite an audible voice that he heard, but it was his first experience of the supernatural. He decided at first to pay no heed to the warning, but his sister from Torquay sent him a telegram following a dream she had. When he arrived at Waterloo Station he felt so troubled that he decided not to travel after all."
The ship, the SS Stella, hit the Casquets near Alderney, and sank with heavy loss of life. Kelly's life had been spared thanks to the warning voice
The details given about the wreck of the Stella appear to be accurate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Stella_(1890)
and Kelly was certainly a real person
https://www.mywesleyanmethodists.org.uk/...es-h-kelly
but it turns out that in 1910 he had published his own account of the incident, in a book entitled "Memories", and this tells quite a different story:
https://archive.org/details/memories00kell/page/324
In this version, instead of hearing a warning voice three times in the night, Kelly wrote that "during the day [I] had a strong presentiment of danger, and felt as if voices of the unseen warned me not to go."
Perhaps more significantly, the details of the ship don't match those of the SS Stella, and in fact there's no mention that any lives were lost from the ship Kelly would have sailed on. It had to return to Southampton, having collided with a French ship whose crew was lost, near the Needles, off the Isle of Wight.
Kelly's version is a lot less dramatic than the one published in the 1950s. But perhaps even the earlier version should be treated with caution. He wrote that it had happened "many years ago". Unfortunately Wikipedia's handy "List of shipwrecks of England" doesn't seem to include one that matches the details given in Kelly's account. Unless I'm missing something:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sh...e_of_Wight